trying to make a difference
While feisty fawn herd5 is ruining my nights sleep, due to wifi not working with my prism54 card, I wanted to drop some notes of other stuff that’s cooking in my head and on my hard-disk for some time now.
lowfat will get an updated page with a proper design-document, a “10000 miles from above”-view, project goals and an additional long-term vision. I also plan to do a talk about it at Guadec’07. Apart from that I have to do a ton of hacking and further research on it (e.g. I want such a multitouch-display setup like Jeff Han has… somehow I got to get my hands on much a setup or build one myself!). lowfat is far from being finished! And yes it is OpenSource for all you sceptics. See here. But please remember, due to my lack of time (read: need to accept offers for paid work) I cannot waste any time to do handholding for end-users or review patches you might want to send in for a project that’s still so young and whichs code-base and design has not settled yet. Furthermore do not even think about packaging it for any distro. It would suggest a finished product to end-users, which is definetly not the case yet. In addition to that such actions would give it a bad reputation before it’s reached a stable state.
A humble attempt to avoid further misunderstandings comes now. lowfat is not meant or going to replace compiz, f-spot, elisa or similar projects. It is a thing of its own. You will see. If you think Apple does cool stuff, I can just mildly smirk.
Please remember, I’m a student, always suffering form a chronic lack of cash, eager to get my degree. As much as I would love to do nothing but work on putting my ideas for Gnome 3.0/4.0 into working code, real life asks other things from me.
I still need to finish the talk/demonstration about “multimedia on GNOME” for CeBIT next week, prepare for my internship at Fluendo (that’s a requirement for cs-studies) next month, maybe even a trip to the LGM2, continue and finish some contracted work. I try to do as much as I possibly can.
March 9th, 2007 at 8:29 am
The current edition of the c’t magazine suggests as a solution to get WiFi ( with WPA ) under Linux with the pirsm54: Buy a supported card
March 9th, 2007 at 8:36 am
Well you are a student and the google SoC is coming up really soon. If anyone would be accepted by any of the gnome devs for a gnome bling proposal, it would be you. If you think of something brilliant and submit it, maybe google would like it enough.
Hint: OpenGL OS X dock-like gdm facebrowser.
Do try out for the summer of code. Talent like yours should not be wasted Mirco.
March 9th, 2007 at 9:27 am
Hi MacSlow!
Seems like your a busy man these days. Keep up the nice work!
A question: Is there any progress on the face browser login front?
Cheers,
dré
March 9th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
yeah, go mirco go!
March 9th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Mirco, i also have a prism54 based wlan adapter.
Where did you report the bug to?
March 9th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
I didn’t try it yet but does lowfat allready support multiple cursors?
With MPX (http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/mpx/) we can use several mice with each one having it’s own cursor.
They have a livecd based on Ubuntu with MPX installed on it and it rocks.
Such support would be great for lowfat, you would be able to resize like in those multi-touchscreen-videos only that you don’t use your fingers instead you use the two mice with it’s two cursors, one on the left side the other on the right and then pull.
If we got luck, MPX would be in Xorg 7.3.
EDIT: Stupid Captcha. X(
March 9th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Dude, I’d never seen lowfat demoed before, but I just tried it out and it is super cool! Good luck with your internship!
March 9th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
The prism54 card issue is a huge one for me also. I have also reported it not working, but nobody seems to want to tackle this regression.
March 10th, 2007 at 12:00 am
i\’m alo having a prism54 card in my laptop and its not working, with a device or resource not ready error in the system log … is it perhaps possible to use the old .deb packages for the wlan driver? does somebody know which package I would need to replace?
March 11th, 2007 at 12:16 am
the problem with MPX and multitouchscreens is, as far as I can see it (not having tried it myself because either me or mpx is too stupid to find & understand the config file) there is still the problem that you have to delete the pointer somehow as soon as the user raises its finger from the surface (creating it seems to be no problem, afaik MPX does support plug-in&play mice but crashes on plug-out)
btw, some narcistic annotation: I just won the regional "Jugend forscht"-contest (science contest for 15- to 21 pupils) — if you want to see my (astonishingly well, btw, was quite baffled myself…) working multitouch-table plus some nice applications I wrote including something lowfat like (without all the coolness, though, but onscreen keyboards): come to the "Deutsches Museum" in Munich at the 28/29th of this Month to see me loose on the next level where all those pros are
btw: the captcha doesn’t really work, there seems to be some shift?!
March 13th, 2007 at 1:14 am
I\’ve been playing with lowfat for a few days and can\’t believe how well it works. With all of your warnings about its lack of readiness for use, I expected it to crash a lot or hog my processor. Instead, it seems efficient and very stable. I know you have multiple projects underway, but lowfat is by far the most interesting to me. I\’ll be watching with great interest for the next \
March 19th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
I Just tried lowfat, and the least I can say is that it’s great, yeah it still need a bit of polishing but i think this is alredy a fantastic toy… tool i mean ^^’.
thanks for this great software. can’t wait to see your "10000 miles from above" plan.
(btw, you did’nt wrote a lot of things in the todo, because you don’t want to be helped? I can understand that if this is the reason, but if this is not, I think some peoples would be glad to help you…)
March 20th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
I’ll update stuff in the git-repository and on the lowfat-project page as soon as I can. Still busy with other bits. It will come don’t worry!
March 29th, 2007 at 10:02 am
Something that may inspire you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ